Coriander Despair

30th April 2012 Monday

Lunchtime - there is a pot of coriander seedlings on the table between us. Plonked there like an accusation. They look spry and healthy. My husband brought them back this morning from the allotment along with similar pots of parsley and rocket. He’s not sure what coriander is. Or rocket.

‘I don’t know why I planted it, he says.‘But I must have grown it before because I had the packet of seeds.’

‘Taste a leaf,’ I say. ‘It’s a herb. ‘I put it in curries.’

He doesn’t recognise the taste or the shape of the leaf.

He wants to leave them in their pots in the garden but I want him to plant them in beds at the allotment so we can have great perfumed bunches all summer long. We argue, get in a muddle. He slips into misery and goes to bed. I go into a turmoil of grief and despair - into the  tunnel of how can you grow things if you don’t know what they are? Peas need sticks to grow up but spinach doesn’t.

And where will he go if not to the allotment? Will he always be here in the kitchen with nothing to do, staring out of the window?

Later we drive out for a walk but the lanes are flooded so end up in the University parks instead but still get mud on our boots. And my heart stays steely cold.

I have found a good place to cry is in the bath -  with the taps running. Tonight the stream of rain drops on the windows adds to the sound proofing - but I hope my husband is asleep by now anyway and can't hear me.

Pink Peppercorns

28th April 2012 Saturday

Walking along a stretch of the Tiverton canal, the rain holds off but the wind is icy. The water is quiet  - we only see one coot, one moorhen and a mallard in the reeds. We pass a  group of sheep and their lambs - their coats the color of apricots. A ploughed field stands out in the green washed landscape - purple as plum skins. My gloveless hands are lavender blue for most of the four miles.

I’m hungry for hot food when we get home. I fry sliced chestnut mushrooms and courgettes in coconut oil, throw in some tasteless cherry tomatoes, loads of garlic, half a cup of  vegetable bouillion and stir in chopped swiss chard when everything is melting soft. At the last minute I shake in some bright pink peppercorns - tiny beads of spice - and think about my niece, who is pregnant, in the Lebanon. She was with me when we bought them in a wonderful Wholefoods Supermarket in London last year. Now her sister is visiting her ....I wonder what they are cooking tonight.

And I think about the  Hungarian woman I read about in the newspaper today. She’s a midwife under 24 hours house arrest in Budapest. She has been in prison for years for delivering babies to women in their homes. The police can come into her house whenever they want. I wonder what they are so afraid of. And what it must be like to never feel safe in your own home.

Book Cycle

27th April 2012 Friday

Our house is full of books. Books in nearly every room. As we are taking three boxes of my father’s books to Book-Cycle in Exeter I suggest that we take some of ours   - well my husband’s anyway, as he won’t be reading them again.  I pick out one book at a time, read out the title, the author. He shakes his head and puts it on the pile on the floor. He doesn’t recognise any of them.

‘Did I really read this?’ he says, flicking through a fat volume of  Robertson Davis’s Cornish Trilogy. 

‘Yes. But not every book on this shelf,’ I say.

But most of them. All that history and politics and psychology and  fiction fantasy and thrillers.

‘Oh, this was your acting Bible,’ I say. A book called ‘Impro’ by Keith Johnson about Improvisation and Method Acting.

‘The name is familiar,’ he says. ‘What do you mean, my Bible?’

So now I know more about my husband’s past than he does. Even the bits when I wasn’t there.

Book-Cycle does a wonderful job - it’s a charity that sends thousands of books to children around the world and plants trees and promotes seed banks and provides performance and art exhibition space.

I’m glad my father’s Bibles - and my husband’s - are going to new homes.

You can find them at www.book-cycle.org

Denial?

26th April 2012 Thursday

Late sun is shining on the garden. A lovely woman is sitting opposite me at our kitchen table. There is a pot of Earl Grey tea between us. She is telling me some practical stuff about how to get help as a carer for my husband. I’m writing it down. She has eighteen years experience of caring for her husband who suffered damage to his brain after a car accident.

I realise I’m not seeing myself as a carer. Not yet. I keep saying how it’s early days for my husband - how it’s not that bad. 

She says there are some things you should be doing now - get them in place for when you will need them.

She tells me about the 5 stages of loss - 

1 denial

2 anger

3 bargaining

4 sadness/despair

5 acceptance

It has taken her till this year to get to number 5.

I’m wondering if I’m still at stage 1- at least flipping between 1 and 2 and 4 - but nothing to bargain with.

Headache, Rain, Aspargus

25th April 2012 Wednesday

I have been stalked by a headache all afternoon - relentless as the rain pounding on the plastic roof of our utility room - sharp and heavy as hail stones. The lawn is a grass lake. The pussy cat picks his way across it like a ballerina on tip toes, shaking water from his paws as he goes. The crimson crinkled-edged tulips have abandoned their dignity and flop over the rims of their pots like drunken rag dolls. 

We risk the weather and walk through rows of pine trees, new lime green growth speckling the tips of their branches. We wade through rusty brown puddles and skid on claggy mud, clutching the hoods of our jackets against the wind. My husband says he’s feeling positive about the future even though he doesn’t know what he can do. I’m practising my new rule of not making helpful suggestions. The rain starts again just before we reach the car so we run the last bit and then head for Sainsbury’s with the de-mister turned up full blast on the windscreen.

I’ve been collecting the first asparagus spears from the allotment - keeping them in the fridge till there are enough for lunch. My husband has been cutting them in twos and threes as they poke up from the soil, tall and straight - like a family of curious meercats. I decide eleven stalks will make a lunch and we feast on them with a salad of peppery green leaves, and sweet tender prawns - the rain making its own raw music on the windows. And drilling into my head.

Snuffling Around in the Past

24th April 2012 Tuesday

I pull the cushions off the sofa and make a bed on the floor.  My husband lies on a blanket next to me. We close our eyes and turn on the voice of Jon Kabat -Zinn who guides us through a Mindfulness Meditation journey starting with the big toe on your left foot and ending with the crown of your head. At one point I remember focussing on my right knee and then diving into oblivion and surfacing when we reach the heart - listening to its pulse briefly before slipping into sleep.

I think it only works if you stay awake but today I have been in a time warp of the past -  de-cluttering my study with my wonderful de-clutterer sister. I’m not sure why it’s so tiring letting go of stuff  - snuffling around in drawers and boxes, disturbing memories and associations like night badgers unearthing roots and grubs. But making changes, making space where there was stagnation makes me feel clearer, cleaner - letting in the light. 

I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel but I may paint some pictures and put them up in place of the old ones  - on my new empty walls - which have been waiting for a me to emerge out of the dense undergrowth where I have been sulking.

And I can’t wait to replace my desk chair with the broken arm  - thinking I had to put up with it forever - thinking I couldn’t change it  - like what I feel about the past.

Sweet As Forgiveness

23rd April 2012 Monday

Good to be home - I’ve been in that hothouse world of a conference in a hotel for three days with my dear sisters and 200 other people. Fulfilled a long held dream to hear Marianne Williamson speak. We sat in the front row and I felt her heart’s passion wash into to the room. At the book-signing afterwards I thought she looked fragile and sad - it must be hard to maintain her reputation of being ‘among the fifty most influential people of her generation’  as it said in the programme.

And I feel so grateful for the other speakers too, especially Robert Holden for reminding me about forgiveness.....how to forgive myself....like this afternoon when I let my irritation with my husband, sitting at the kitchen table feeling lost and depressed, boil over and burn him -  and then me....the pain in his eyes....the agony of my guilt......and then taking it back knowing nothing is wrong.....making amends....

Now he’s out singing in his choir, raindrops are spraying my window, a big pan of gingery, garlicky veggies is simmering on the stove downstairs, and curling smoke from an incense stick is wafting across my desk -  sweet as forgiveness.